ike Charlie Brown’s Pigpen, you can almost smell Josh O’Connor in La Chimera. He’s publicly humiliated for his foul aroma by a peddler on the train he’s riding at the start of the movie; you cannot sense it getting any better at any point in the film (except at the end, when someone demands he clean up) because he never takes off his ever-dirtying cream-white suit, the stubble on his face and the mop on his head gradually getting to places that could reasonably be called “out of control.”
Hygiene comes secondary when you’re as beleaguered with grief and obsession as O’Connor’s character, Arthur, is. He’s grieving because his beautiful blonde love interest, only seen in visions, is missing, maybe dead. And he’s obsessed with locating long-lost Etruscan artifacts buried all over Tuscany, where this 1980s-set movie takes place.
Arthur is, of course, in it for the money, like the crew of fellow grave robbers with whom he marauders. Their risky misadventures are frequently chaotic, often edited into fast motion to evoke the bumbling-around comedy of a silent slapstick short. But Arthur is most preoccupied with finding a certain treasure — a door — said to ensure passage to the afterlife. Sometimes, ancient curios appear to him and his crew almost coincidentally. Other times, hard work pays off, like when some beachside digging leads to an artifact-rich crypt roomy enough to wander around. One could feel a little queasy as the characters vacuum up what’s not theirs; one will probably feel queasier when in the presence of a well-coiffed black-market dealer (Alba Rohrwacher) who appears late in the film. A glamorous ringer for the late Monica Vitti, the saleswoman condescends to her fleet of grave robbers as if she were somehow more noble by virtue of her financial and societal upper hand.
Like the mysterious, maybe-dead woman Arthur misses, we do not learn much about almost anybody in La Chimera. Its big ensemble has the gauzy quality of ghosts just passing through; the bulk of our getting to know them comes from conversations that only stay on the surface. (You always feel like an outsider getting in the way of a tight-knit friend group’s flow.) What can be said about Arthur is that he seems haunted; his one-dimensional inscrutability hinders emotional involvement in a movie where no one else is better defined than that.
La Chimera, writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth feature, looks good. Its colors are gorgeously ghostly and blanched; Rohrwacher’s penchant for fetchingly crumbling settings (like the deteriorating mansion lived in by a character played by Isabella Rossellini, done up in old-lady drag) evocatively reinforces the sense of history and time’s passage inherent in its ensemble’s fixation on a past that will provide them with their future. Film stocks shift around — from Super 16 to 16mm to 35mm — when the mood is right, which it almost always is. Funny fourth-wall breaks are common.
Rohrwacher’s hospitality to anything-goes narrative asides and warmth toward her unruly characters lend the film a charming sense of unpredictable adventurousness. You’re always curious about where it’ll go next, even if there isn’t much emotional ground on which to stand. The critic Michelle Orange opined recently that Rohrwacher is “less interested in telling a story than casting a spell”; La Chimera gets better at doing the latter the longer you explore its world.
As the enigmatic Arthur, O’Connor, with his elegant cheekbones, often-roiling eyes, and uncomfortable-in-his-skin gangliness, is magnetic to watch. Arthur’s chronic tetchiness is a nice foil in a movie whose whimsy proves almost inescapable. (Not even the honey-voiced performer at a bar the characters visit one evening is immune; her dulcet tones suddenly take a rest so that she can show off just how good a jaw-harper she is.) I wish I knew Arthur as well as I did that Rohrwacher’s topsy-turvy style is likably original despite the film’s shortcomings. La Chimera is the kind of movie that makes you suspicious that things may better click upon another go around. Until then.
Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate. All imagery courtesy of Neon.
Michael Mohan and Sydney Sweeney’s first collaboration, 2021’s The Voyeurs, was a sleek, convoluted homage to the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Their follow-up, Immaculate, is another throwback, putting you in mind of the unholy studio-sanctioned horror movies that tried capitalizing for a few years on the devilish interest shored up by 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby: inferior to the film they’re living in the shadow of but not a bad time, with style to spare.
Also recalling the eerie Italian horror movies of Michele Soavi and Dario Argento, Immaculate isn’t completely stuck in the past, though. Rooted in the progressive mores of the present, it’s religion, rather than devil worship and the like, that’s depicted as a perversion, and it thematically brings to mind the former’s cynical weaponization against reproductive rights even if Mohan has said he doesn’t particularly want the post-Roe movie to be seen as having a message. Bearing the brunt of the film’s horrors is Cecilia (Sweeney), a naïve nun from Detroit who, as the film opens, takes an offer to join a secluded convent in Italy after her lowly attended parish shutters. Immaculate immediately makes it clear that her impulsive life change is about as good an idea as roaming around an abandoned house with a killer inside. In the dark and foggy prologue, a scared-out-of-her-wits sister gets her leg broken, and then is buried alive, by her peers after trying to escape from the sweeping property’s chained and padlocked grounds.
Before she can fully get settled, Cecilia is having nightmares in which her fellow nuns are doing things like ritualistically sacrificing her. Then the bad vibes turn tangible when it’s discovered that she’s pregnant. Except for a handful of healthily suspicious sisters about her age, everyone at the convent seems to figure this must be the second coming of Christ, since Cecilia is believably adamant about never having been with a man.
The reality is more nefarious than that. Immaculate’s ride up, with all its dangling mysteries and surplus of imagery making good on the innate malevolence of a big, beautifully designed place of worship, is when it’s most effective. Our own speculation about what could be going on works efficiently in conjunction with screenwriter Andrew Lobel’s methodical withholding. But as it goes with so much horror — a genre arguably most hospitable to the powers of ambiguity — the inevitable explanation of too many of our questions dulls some of Immaculate’s impact. Some good set pieces, namely a teasingly lit cat-and-mouse chase through some labyrinthine catacombs, inject energy when the narrative’s thrills wane.
Sweeney, who also co-produced the movie, excels in parts like the one Immaculate gives her — thrown into a fraught situation where a deluge of overwhelming emotions eventually becomes too much to bear, her wide, often tear-soaked eyes her best asset. The actress recently enjoyed much success with the sleeper romantic comedy Anyone But You (2023), where her chemistry with co-star Glen Powell was strong but where she nonetheless felt awkward as a requisitely clumsy rom-com heroine with pretty problems. Sweeney is such an expressive performer that a movie like Anyone But You, which doesn’t require much of that skill, can make it seem like she’s going through the motions, her monotone speaking voice hardly a help. Immaculate, in contrast, showcases an actress in her element — something I’m happy to report about a movie that ends with several unbroken moments of her guttural screams.
Peterson Reviews 